Catherine Opie: Holding Blue

Western Cowboy: Reloaded, on view at CPAC from May 8 through June 20, 2026, revisits one of the most enduring figures in American visual culture with a measured, contemporary lens. Curated by Samantha Johnston, the exhibition gathers six Colorado-based photographers—Juan Fuentes, Constance Jaeggi, Amanda Lopez, Jack Ludlam, Rob Hammer, and Ian Warren—whose work collectively challenges the simplified mythology of the cowboy and reframes it within a broader cultural and historical context. For generations, the cowboy has occupied a central place in the American imagination, often portrayed as a solitary figure embodying independence and resilience. Yet this exhibition shifts the focus away from that familiar narrative, drawing attention instead to the diverse communities and traditions that have shaped the American West. Indigenous histories, Hispanic heritage, and the practical realities of ranching and rodeo life all surface in these images, complicating the notion of a singular, unified identity. The photographers approach the subject from varied perspectives. Some turn toward portraiture, capturing riders, wranglers, and workers in moments of quiet presence that emphasize lived experience over legend. Others focus on the material culture of the West—worn leather, weathered landscapes, tools of labor—highlighting the tactile dimensions of a life often romanticized from a distance. Scenes of rodeo culture introduce a different energy, where physical endurance and risk replace the stillness of traditional iconography. What emerges is not a rejection of the cowboy figure, but a recalibration. The exhibition acknowledges the symbolic power of the image while insisting on a more nuanced understanding of its origins and meanings. By presenting multiple viewpoints, it opens a space for reconsideration, where the West appears less as a fixed idea and more as an evolving set of relationships between land, labor, and identity. Timed alongside significant historical anniversaries, Western Cowboy: Reloaded situates its inquiry within a broader reflection on national narratives. It suggests that revisiting familiar symbols can reveal overlooked histories, offering a more grounded and inclusive vision of the American West. Image: Cowpuncher, © Rob Hammer

The domestic sphere and the physiological realities of postpartum existence are subjected to a rigorous deconstruction in Tired, Warrior, Defeated, In Love, the first solo exhibition by Alma Haser at Candela Book Gallery. Running through June 20, 2026, the project moves away from the artist’s known focus on identical twins and complex paper folding to examine the systemic and biological pressures of motherhood. Haser, a German-born photographer based in the United Kingdom, utilizes grand silks and mixed-media prints to document the physical toll of caregiving, recording images of stretched skin, bruised tissue, and the structural changes of the maternal body. The work functions as a journalistic rebuttal to the sanitized, idyllic imagery of family life prevalent in commercial media, presenting instead a "patchwork" of time that reflects the mental load and chaotic nature of the role. The technical execution of the series involves a layering of time and form, where the boundaries between mother and child become visually indistinguishable. This "porosity" of identity is a central theme, exploring the simultaneous sensations of claustrophobia and euphoria. Haser’s methodology involves an ongoing dialogue with a cohort of mothers, incorporating their personal narratives and responses into the visual framework. By utilizing analogue techniques and sculptural manipulations, she creates a textured representation of self-sacrifice and rebirth. The exhibition highlights the instability of the maternal persona, framing it as an experience rooted in both the biological imperative and the sociological expectations placed upon women. The result is a stark, evidence-based portrait of a journey that is as much about the loss of the former self as it is about the creation of new life. Complementing the photographic works is Four Legs, a series of unique ceramic miniature chairs displayed alongside their photographic counterparts. This segment of the exhibition serves as a physical manifestation of the artist’s need for autonomy within the domestic environment. Haser describes the repetitive act of crafting these objects as a means of exerting control over a micro-space, providing a psychological counterweight to the unpredictability of daily life. This multidisciplinary approach—combining photography, sculpture, and text—reinforces Haser’s standing as a transformative figure in contemporary portraiture. Her work, which previously earned the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, continues to challenge the viewer’s perception of reality, forcing a confrontation with the raw and often messy data of human development and survival within the family unit. Image: © Alma Haser

Daniel John Lockwood: Naturally Wisconsin presents nature not as backdrop, but as a language of its own. In this body of work, Lockwood turns toward the woods, water, fields, and seasonal shifts of Wisconsin to explore what lies beneath visible beauty: rhythm, structure, and a quiet spiritual charge. His photographs do more than describe a place. They ask how a landscape communicates when words fall short, when color becomes feeling, and form becomes a kind of hidden order. The exhibition reflects a deeply attentive way of seeing. Lockwood’s images hold close to the physical world, yet they also move toward something more elusive. A stand of trees, a patch of reflected light, the geometry of branches, or the layered tones of snow and earth become occasions for reflection. Rather than treating nature as a simple subject to be recorded, he approaches it as a source of mystery, one that rewards patience and close looking. The result is a photographic language shaped by stillness, observation, and an almost devotional awareness of pattern. Lockwood’s thinking echoes a belief that nature carries meaning beyond immediate appearance. In these works, that meaning emerges through contrast: softness and structure, lyricism and discipline, surface and depth. His titles and visual interventions gently redirect the viewer, inviting a more active encounter with color and composition. The images remain grounded in straight photography, yet they also hint at interpretation, as if each scene were asking to be read as well as seen. At a moment when daily life pulls attention away from the natural world, Naturally Wisconsin offers a slower, more contemplative register. The exhibition suggests that art can renew awareness of our connection to the environment, not by explaining it away, but by restoring the conditions for wonder. In Lockwood’s hands, nature becomes both subject and invitation: to look longer, to feel more deeply, and to recognize the living intelligence of the world around us. Image: BACKWATER BALLET © Daniel Lockwood

Mike Brodie, on view from May 2 to June 13, 2026 at Casemore Gallery, marks the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the American photographer, whose work has come to define a raw and immersive vision of life on the margins. Known for his early years documenting freight train travel across the United States, Brodie’s images offer a perspective shaped not by observation from afar, but by lived experience within the communities he photographs. Brodie’s entry into photography begins almost by accident, after discovering a Polaroid camera in the early 2000s. What follows is a period of constant movement, as he travels alongside a network of drifters, hitchhikers, and train hoppers. Shooting under the name “The Polaroid Kidd,” he produces a series of intimate portraits and scenes that capture both the harshness and camaraderie of transient life. These early works, characterized by their immediacy and physical closeness, quickly gain recognition for their unfiltered portrayal of a rarely seen subculture. As materials change, so does his approach. The transition from Polaroid to 35mm film marks a shift toward a broader narrative, culminating in the publication of A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. The book receives widespread acclaim and situates Mike Brodie within a lineage of American photographers concerned with movement, identity, and the open road. His photographs echo earlier traditions while maintaining a distinctly contemporary sensibility, rooted in personal connection rather than detached documentation. After stepping away from photography for several years, Brodie returns with new work that reflects a different phase of life. His more recent images, gathered in the monograph Failing, trace a quieter yet no less intense exploration of relationships, labor, and introspection. The focus shifts from collective experience to more personal narratives, revealing the passage of time and the complexities that accompany it. This exhibition brings these trajectories into focus, presenting Brodie’s practice as both a record of a specific moment and an ongoing inquiry into belonging and survival. His photographs remain grounded in empathy, offering a view of American life that resists simplification while retaining a sense of immediacy and truth. Image: Mike Brodie, #5060, 2025, Archival Pigment Print © Mike Brodie, courtesy of the Casemore Gallery

At the Catherine Couturier Gallery, the exhibition Sander Vos unfolds as a meditation on perception and the mechanics of seeing. Presented from May 16 to June 20, 2026, the show introduces audiences to a body of work that resists the immediacy often associated with contemporary photography. Born in 1988 in the Netherlands and now based in London, Sander Vos approaches the medium as a site of construction rather than documentation, challenging viewers to reconsider how images are formed and understood. Vos builds his photographs through a process of fragmentation and recomposition. Drawing from portraits, still lifes, and mundane objects, he assembles layered compositions that hover between abstraction and recognition. The familiar becomes unstable: a face dissolves into planes of light, a simple object fractures into overlapping perspectives. This deliberate disruption interrupts the ease of visual consumption, encouraging a slower, more attentive mode of looking. In these images, clarity is never immediate but gradually negotiated through sustained observation. Central to the work is the interplay of light, shadow, and negative space. These elements do not merely describe form but actively reshape it, creating visual tensions that guide the viewer’s eye while withholding resolution. Vos works across both digital and analog techniques, combining photographic capture with collage-like interventions that blur the boundaries between mediums. The resulting images feel at once precise and elusive, grounded in reality yet drifting toward something more introspective and psychological. The exhibition also reflects the growing international recognition of Vos’s practice. Recent distinctions, including a juror’s selection at the LensCulture Portrait Awards and accolades such as the Graciela Iturbide Award and the PX3 Paris Photo Prize, underscore the relevance of his approach within a broader photographic landscape. His work also appears on the cover of AAP Magazine Shapes 2024, further marking his visibility within the field. Exhibitions at Photo London and the London Art Fair further situate his work within an evolving dialogue on contemporary image-making. At Catherine Couturier Gallery, his photographs offer a space where perception slows, inviting viewers to engage with the act of seeing as an unfolding process rather than a fixed conclusion. Image: Interpolation 07, 2024, archival pigment print © Sander Vos, courtesy of the Catherine Couturier Gallery

Humid Traces, presented at the Ford Foundation Gallery from February 19 through June 20, 2026, brings water to the forefront as both subject and witness. At a moment defined by rising temperatures and intensifying climate instability, the exhibition examines how rivers, seas, and wetlands become charged sites where migration, memory, and power intersect. Water is shown not as a passive backdrop, but as an active force shaping human movement and redefining political boundaries. Across immersive installations, soundscapes, photography, video, and data-driven works, the exhibition reveals how attempts to control water—through borders, infrastructure, and extraction—ultimately expose its resistance to domination. Water carries histories within its currents, absorbing traces of displacement, labor, and survival. In doing so, it undermines rigid systems that seek to define who may cross and who must remain, suggesting alternative ways of understanding territory as fluid rather than fixed. The participating artists, drawn from diverse geographic and cultural contexts, approach water as both material and metaphor. Their works trace coastlines, riverbeds, and migratory routes shaped by colonial legacies, environmental degradation, and contemporary policy. Whether documenting contested waterways or visualizing unseen flows, these practices reveal how bodies of water become mirrors of global inequality while also holding the potential for shared responsibility and collective care. Curated by Federico Pérez Villoro, the exhibition is grounded in sustained research into political ecologies and technological systems. His long-term engagement with border rivers and access to freshwater informs the show’s emphasis on water’s shifting morphology and its capacity to redraw maps. Rather than presenting definitive answers, the exhibition invites viewers to listen, observe, and move alongside water’s rhythms, recognizing its agency and its role as an archive of lived experience. Ultimately, Humid Traces proposes water as a connective medium—one that links distant geographies through common vulnerability and resilience. By following its flows, the exhibition gestures toward new forms of solidarity that emerge not from imposed lines, but from shared dependence on a resource that refuses to be contained. Image: Zishaan A Latif. The Edge, 2023. Courtesy of the Artist. © Zishaan A Latif

Markus Brunetti: FACADES IV, on view at Yossi Milo Gallery from April 30 to June 20, 2026, presents an immersive encounter with Europe’s most enduring sacred architecture. For more than two decades, Brunetti has devoted his artistic life to photographing cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and synagogues, approaching each structure with a rigor and patience that echoes the dedication of their original builders. His work offers not documentation in the conventional sense, but a sustained act of reverence toward architectural form, craft, and belief. At the heart of the exhibition are works from Brunetti’s ongoing FACADES series, images constructed through an exacting process that pushes photography beyond its traditional limits. For each monument, Brunetti produces thousands of photographs over extended periods of time, carefully capturing every surface, detail, and irregularity. These images are later assembled into seamless composites that eliminate perspective distortion, presenting the building frontally and in its entirety. The resulting works offer a clarity of vision that feels almost timeless, recalling the compositional balance and idealized symmetry found in classical painting. Brunetti’s practice is governed by strict self-imposed rules. Each façade is photographed head-on, beneath an overcast sky that neutralizes shadow and dramatization. By returning repeatedly to the same site and living in close proximity to the structure, the artist develops an intimate understanding of the building’s rhythms and proportions. This slow, methodical engagement allows the architecture to emerge as both object and subject, stripped of distraction and revealed in quiet authority. Integral to this journey is Brunetti’s collaboration with Betty Schöner, with whom he travels across Europe in a converted firetruck that serves as a mobile studio and living space. Together, they research and select sites that reflect the cultural, religious, and stylistic diversity of sacred architecture across the continent. Their nomadic existence underscores the project’s depth of commitment, transforming the act of photographing into a way of life. In these monumental yet contemplative images, Brunetti achieves something rare: a vision of architecture seemingly suspended outside of time. His facades stand complete, unified, and serene, inviting viewers to contemplate human ambition, devotion, and the enduring power of built form. Image: Badia Fiesolana, Fiesole, 2022-2025 Archival Pigment © Markus Brunetti

A Surreal Lens invites viewers into a world where photography becomes a bridge between reality and imagination. Since the invention of the medium, artists have resisted the notion of photography as a purely documentary tool, instead transforming it into a language of dreams, memories, and illusions. By experimenting with techniques such as montage, double exposure, retouching, and digital manipulation, these photographers blur the line between what is seen and what is felt, crafting images that question our understanding of truth and perception. The exhibition gathers artists who use both technical precision and poetic vision to explore the hidden corners of the mind. Whether through staged compositions or post-production transformations, their works evoke the surreal and the uncanny. These photographs may resemble fragments of dreams or echoes of alternate realities, inviting the viewer to step into a dimension where logic bends and emotion reigns. While not all of these artists align directly with Surrealism, they embody its essence—an exploration of the subconscious and a fascination with the beauty of the strange. Featuring the works of Alan Cohen, György Kepes, Olivia Parker, Kenda North, Michael Stone, Linda Connor, Emmet Gowin, Barbara Morgan, Otmar Thormann, Hans Breder, and others, A Surreal Lens showcases how diverse artistic voices can converge through a shared pursuit of mystery and transformation. Each image reveals the photographer’s hand as both creator and dreamer, manipulating light and time to build impossible worlds that feel intimately familiar. Through this collective vision, the exhibition challenges viewers to reconsider what a photograph can be—not merely a mirror of reality, but a portal into imagination itself. Here, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the camera becomes a tool not for recording the world, but for reimagining it. Image: Michael Stone (American, born 1945), Whitehouse Products, 2015, archival pigment print on hahnemuhle photo rag paper, 8 x 12 inches, Gift of the artist, 2016.32.2

Picturing Isabella, on view at the Fenway Gallery from February 19 to June 21, 2026, offers a nuanced exploration of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s lifelong negotiation with visibility, celebrity, and self-invention. Living at a moment when photography was becoming central to modern life, Gardner simultaneously benefited from and resisted its power. This exhibition reveals how her reluctance to be photographed was not simply shyness, but a deliberate strategy—one that allowed her to maintain control over how she was seen, remembered, and ultimately mythologized. Early photographs show Gardner as a young woman shaped by the conventions of late nineteenth-century portraiture: formal poses, composed expressions, and a clear assertion of social standing. As her influence grew and her public profile expanded, her relationship to the camera shifted. She became increasingly selective, choosing when and how she would appear, often obscured by veils, shadows, or turned profiles. These gestures transformed photography into a performative space where absence and suggestion carried more weight than direct representation. The exhibition brings together an evocative range of materials, including personal snapshots, travel photographs, newspaper images, and candid moments shared with friends and animals. Rather than constructing a single definitive portrait, these fragments accumulate into a layered and sometimes contradictory image of Gardner—private yet theatrical, guarded yet expressive. Each photograph hints at a woman keenly aware of the power of images, and equally aware of their limitations. In resisting the camera, Gardner shaped a public persona that thrived on mystery and contradiction. Ultimately, Picturing Isabella suggests that Gardner’s most enduring self-portrait is not found in any photograph, but in the museum she built. Carefully staged, deeply personal, and intentionally enigmatic, the Gardner Museum stands as an extension of her identity—an architectural and curatorial statement that replaced the traditional portrait. Through this lens, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider how legacy is constructed, and how the act of withholding can be as powerful as the act of display. Image: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (P33w35) Otto Rosenheim (German, 1871–1955), Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1906. Gelatin silver print

Face Value invites us to take a close look at the celebrity-making machinery of the 20th-century Hollywood star system. For decades, film studios produced photographic portraits to promote the glamour of the actors they had under contract. This exhibition examines how these images were manipulated for public consumption in the decades before digital tools, AI technology, and social media revolutionized the process. For MoMA’s founding film curator, Iris Barry, building an archive of images that documented the history of motion pictures was second only to collecting films. Barry’s initiative eventually led to the acquisition of editorial archives of two leading fan magazines, Photoplay (1911–80) and Dell (1921–76). More than 60 photographers and filmmakers—from studio staffers to Andy Warhol—are represented in the exhibition, which combines untouched images with those that show evidence of the hands-on alterations that readied them for the press. Silhouetting, in-painting, masking, sectioning, and collage were applied not only to photographs of entertainers but also to those of sports figures, socialites, and politicians. Highlighting the radical editing practices, stylized motifs, and gender stereotypes inherent in the studio system, this exhibition offers a demystifying look at the early constructions of celebrity. Organized by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, with Katie Trainor, Senior Collections Manager, and Cara Shatzman, Collection Specialist, Department of Film. Image: Jean Harlow, c. 1933. Photographer unidentified. Gelatin silver print. The Museum of Modern Art film stills collection

Chris McCaw: Double Day, presented at SF Camerawork from May 21 through June 21, 2026, offers a rare opportunity to experience one of the Bay Area photographer’s most ambitious works on the West Coast. Organized in collaboration with Haines Gallery, the exhibition centers on McCaw’s monumental Sunburn series, a body of work that transforms photography into a direct physical encounter with light, duration, and the movement of the Earth itself. For more than two decades, McCaw has pushed the medium beyond traditional image-making through the use of hand-built large-format cameras and long exposures powered entirely by sunlight. In his process, concentrated rays of light pass through oversized lenses and physically scorch photographic paper over hours or even days. The resulting images exist somewhere between photograph, drawing, and scientific trace, recording not only a landscape but also the passage of time as a tangible event. At the center of the exhibition is Sunburned GSP #860 (Double midnight, Galbraith Lake, Arctic Circle, Alaska), created during the Arctic summer in 2015. Stretching more than 25 feet across 25 silver gelatin panels, the work documents approximately thirty continuous hours beneath the “midnight sun,” when daylight never fully disappears near the Arctic Circle. The photograph captures looping solar trajectories burned directly into the paper, while weather conditions, shifting clouds, and subtle changes in the landscape emerge across the composition. Both technically rigorous and visually overwhelming, the piece reflects McCaw’s fascination with humanity’s small position within a larger cosmic system. Born in Daly City, California, McCaw studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute and remains closely connected to the Bay Area’s experimental photographic tradition. His practice draws from early photographic history while simultaneously challenging contemporary assumptions about digital image production and manipulation. Rather than relying on software or postproduction, his works are shaped through elemental forces: sunlight, heat, chemistry, and time. With Double Day, SF Camerawork continues its long-standing support of artists redefining the possibilities of photography. The exhibition positions McCaw’s work not simply as landscape photography, but as a meditation on endurance, perception, and the physical reality of light itself. Image: Detail of Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP #860 (Double midnight, Galbraith Lake, Arctic Circle, Alaska), 2015

A Light Exists in Spring, on view from May 7 to June 23, 2026, is a central exhibition of PhotoCarmel 2026, curated by Ann Jastrab and presented at the Marjorie Evans Gallery at the Sunset Center in Carmel. Borrowing its title from Emily Dickinson’s poem, the exhibition reflects on the subtle transformation of the world as winter gives way to renewal. It gathers the work of nearly fifty artists who are deeply embedded in the Center for Photographic Art—as volunteers, trustees, staff, and committed stewards of the photographic medium. United by a shared attentiveness to landscape, light, and seasonal change, the participating artists approach spring not as a simple subject, but as a state of perception. Their photographs linger in moments of emergence: lengthening days, shifting atmospheres, and the quiet signals of growth that often go unnoticed. Across diverse practices, the exhibition suggests that spring’s promise is not only visual, but emotional—an invitation to pause, observe, and remain open to transformation. The works on view span a wide range of photographic techniques, from early historical processes such as platinum palladium printing and cyanotypes to contemporary digital and mixed media approaches. This dialogue between past and present mirrors the exhibition’s thematic core, where time feels both fleeting and suspended. Handmade prints sit alongside experimental works, each offering a distinct response to the rhythms of nature and the enduring power of light as photography’s most essential element. More than a showcase of technical mastery, A Light Exists in Spring is a portrait of a community bound by curiosity, care, and shared vision. Curated with sensitivity and restraint, the exhibition invites viewers to slow down and attune themselves to subtle shifts—within the landscape and within themselves. In doing so, it echoes Dickinson’s insight: that certain moments, brief yet luminous, leave an imprint long after the light has changed. Image: Eduardo Fujii, The Psychology of Trees, archival pigment print with mixed media and gold leaf © Eduardo Fujii.